11/28/10

I've recently joined several websites that do contests for the right to have your artwork printed and sold. This promises to keep me quite busy on a portfolio. This also gives a lot of my artwork a second chance!

This robot design is my latest submission. It was originally designed for the Woot! robot derby and ended in the 40's. I think 46th place. Never the less, I love this design and am re-submitting it as is to DesignedbyHumans.com.

DesignedbyHumans is a great t-shirt site where for the most part, the artwork is less cute and more artistic. I like this as it's hard to be witty and cute sometimes. Some days I just want to create art for art's sake.

As of right now, this piece is pending approval before it can go up for voting. Rest assured, if approved I will be promoting the hell out of this design.

As always, thanks for reading. I'm off to work more on this blog and try to either update an older design or bust out some new artwork. I've got lots of ideas flowing and I'm itching to bring them all to life.

11/23/10

The Derby: - Derby #174: CrosshatchBack in the g-, well, not really GOOD old days...back in the old days artists didn't have your fancy Photoshops and Illustrators and four-color printing methods. They didn't have much at all, really, which is why they invented hatching, also known as cross-hatching (we're calling this Derby cross-hatching so 50 people didn't immediately start sketching cracked eggs before reading this far). Using lines of varying length, angle, thickness, closeness, etc. artists could create the appearance of depth, volume, brightness, and color. Now we want you to do it. Using only hatched lines (no, cribbing from our line art Derby won't help), create t-shirt magic. For inspiration and more info, look up masters like Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer or our favorite, Edward Gorey. Now for the rules:

Designs must be one color only. Whatever shade that first line is, so shall all your lines be.

Line width must be a minimum 2 point. Otherwise we might have to reject it due to "un-printability."

No video games.

No Star Wars.

No text.

No depictions of things hatching. A totally random rule from a totally random Woot staffer totally-randomly named Randy.

And once again, a reminder about our new de facto print requirements. These are the new rules for submitting art from here on out, so we'll be posting them every now and again so everyone gets a chance to see them (even if they might not be relevant this time around):
If you're using Photoshop, make certain that your halftones are at least 30 LPI for a full-size design at 300 DPI.

If you're using Illustrator, please submit your final art with gradients. We'll create the halftones on our end.

I love this derby. Cross-hatching has always been my thing. I love to work in ink and cross-hatching is the name of the game. I especially love that this is a 1 color entry.

The image I had in my head was an octopus for some reason. I wanted to do something scratch-board like illustrating the light values only. Here's what I came up with:

Currently I'm in 49th place with 65 votes. It's kind of dis-heartening because I really fell in love with this piece. But, I'm glad to be as high on the list as I am. I guess at this point in the game no publicity is bad publicity.

I designed this entirely in Adobe Illustrator CS5 in about 3 hours. I had a blast working on it. Very little agony went into this piece unlike others I have done. Though I think it's too late to pull ahead and get in the top 3, I am proud to call this one my own.

Shirt.Woot.Com offers the derby every week. The Derby is a great chance for up and coming illustrators to get their art out there. It also offers a great forum to get comments on your artwork and to better yourself and evolve as an artist.

What I really love about the weekly derby is the specifications that come with a project to do. This is great practice for someone trying to break into the world of illustration. An illustrator lives to do projects. It's helps narrow your inspiration and concentrate on an idea. The deadlines are tight if you want to get any hope for votes. This keeps me working hard in my office/studio on weekends doing something productive. I can't say enough good things about shirt.woot.com!

From now on I will be posting my weekly entries and their progress. It's something to write about and drop in my portfolio. And, I'm notorious for not writing in my blog that I care about so much.